Mail.app usage paradigm

I feel like I'm in a rut using Mail.app. I think it is easy to get stuck in your ways even though new features abound. Currently I POP my mail from multiple accounts and then sort it in to a Primary Folder (Work, Family, Friends, etc) and then into a Sub-Folder according to the persons name. This was handy pre-Spotlight, but now folder organization is a bit moot as things can be searched quickly. It is also a pain to set up so many rules.

So...what are other people doing? No folders? Fewer folders? What are good examples of SmartFolders? I have one for pre-2003 e-mail, but it turns out you can't archive SmartFolders by drag-drop to the Desktop. Any ideas?

i have tons of rules too. most simply move mail to a different folder on the server side (i have 1 .Mac account and 1 IMAP style server).
I have a smart folder that only has new mail (unread and not in junk folder) in it, so i just go there and tend to read the mail as it comes in.
Since all the new syncing in tiger, i can finally keep my mail synced over my 2 computers - phew!

I'm in almost the same boat. I've given smart folders a serious look, but here's my big problem with them:

Smart folders seem to be just aliases to the original emails, like an iTunes playlist. So where do I keep all of my REAL emails if I use smart folders? The inbox? No way, I'm not keeping years and years worth of emails in my inbox. The only other option I can think of is to make a huge "Archived" folder and then make smart folders that read from that...

your post inspired me to experiment. one idea i just came up with involves the use of address book groups and smart folders. i'm on a committee at college and have a contact list for other members of this committee which i previously put into a group in Address Book. i then created a smart folder with the condition that the recipients were a member of this group, and it seems to work pretty well. one issue is that some members of the group send me emails that aren't necessarily related to committee business, but that doesn't seem to be that big of a deal. nevertheless i can see this being done likewise with a "family" or "my posse" group. you could even make a group of everyone in your address book and make folders separating mail from known contacts and unknown contacts using this group.

i'm curious to see what others come up with in this thread.

edit: i see what hemingray's saying, and i just added a new not-smart mailbox (dumb mailbox?) called "old mail" and a rule that moves all messages to this mailbox after they're a month old. smart mailboxes still pull from this folder while keeping your inbox clean of all mail older than a month old.

I use rules and smart folders together. I assign rules to archive mail according to who sent them and use smart folders to keep track of current projects.

For example, mail from Bob and John get sent to the Bob and John folders. On top of that I have a smart folder set up for certain projects. So relevant e-mails from Bob and John regarding projects that we are working on together will also appear in the pertinent smart folders.

So basically I use rules for archiving and smart folders to organise/handle my mail. This way the alias nature of smart folders suit me perfectly. Works like a dream, makes me wonder how I survived without it before!

I have 1 (one) folder where all mail of a certain period, usually half a year, goes to. When I need to search something, i usually know more or less _when_ i received that piece of information. Then I only have to search in 1 or maybe two folders for the name, address, content, whatever.
I do not like having multiple folders (physically, "smart folders" don't count here) because there is usually more than one criteria a certain mail can fulfill and therefore the concept of sorting mail in different physical folders is quite useless to me.

I don't store anything on the mail server. I have 3 custom folders and 1 custom smart folder.

One of the 3 folders lives on my Mac - it is used as a sort of archive for messages I want to save.
The other 2 live on the mail server, and are rule destination folders - used for notifications of replies here and at another forum I frequently visit.

The smart folder simply displays all messages that have not yet been read.

My Mail app has at leat 20 folders with rules. Is there anyway these folders can by synced with my .mac account? or is it smart folders only? I have been playing with smart folders but cant quite see the point in them

The reason i ask is that i have so many folders to keep my mails organized, but when i am away from home, only the mail in my inbox stays on my .mac account, anything that gets moved into a folder, does not stay online at my .mac account as i would like it to

The other thing is, what happens when i run out of space? for example, i have about 2000 emails in my mail app, i would like all 2000 at .mac but only 700 are, as thats all that is in my inbox, the rest are in folders. when my 250mb is full on .mac, does it simply start knocking them off one by one from the bottom? and is there any need to still backup all my emails to my external HDD that are in the inbox? or can i rely on .mac to back them up? i assume if i reinstalled Tiger, all my emails from .mac would automatically download into my mail app? if so, does this include attatchments?

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